From Marginalia to Madonna, and the power of Queer Catholic Art to Liberate
A Whiplash Podcast Recap
On this week’s episode of Whiplash, we spoke with Dani of AndHerSaints about the power of queer Catholic art as a conduit for liberation and visibility. With Emma’s interest in art history and Max’s fascination with the power of aesthetics to shape experience, we had an engaging conversation about how Catholic art has historically and presently been a pathway for queer people to see and represent themselves.
We explored Dani’s journey as an artist and how it resonates with the paths of other queer Catholic creators—touching on the history of queer Catholic patronage and representation, and affirming the power of creative joy and playful rebellion as sacred acts of resistance.
A Queer Artist’s Beginnings
Dani grew up drawing animals and attending an all-girls Opus Dei Catholic high school. While they loved art, their creativity was often channeled into rigid, prescribed forms—like making sawdust carpets for Corpus Christi or painting religious icons at their mother’s request. At the time, Dani identified as an atheist, feeling deeply distrustful of and disillusioned with the Catholic Church.
As time went on, however, something felt missing. Without the external push to make art, they found themselves creatively adrift—until their aunt gave them an iPad as a graduation gift. With that, Dani began to draw again.
As their art practice deepened, so too did their spiritual life. Dani found themselves returning to the Church, drawn not to the institutional hierarchy but to the lives of queer and trans saints whose medieval hagiographies revealed a radical closeness to God through their queerness. They discovered within Catholicism a rich tradition of explicitly queer representation—hidden in plain sight.
Their first deep connection came through St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whom they began to depict in their art. Known today as the patron saint of those dying of HIV/AIDS, Thérèse became a personal icon of resistance and reclamation. Opus Dei leaders had once cruelly framed the suffering of AIDS patients as divine punishment—Dani’s art refuted that narrative with tenderness and power.
Thérèse’s own writings and life reflected a queering of sanctity. She grappled with gender, imagining herself as a priest, a warrior, and, famously, donning armor in photographs where she dressed as St. Joan of Arc—another figure many have come to see as a queer saint. Through these saints, Dani found both artistic inspiration and spiritual belonging.
Encountering and Depicting Queer Saints
Dani’s artistic journey led them to explore complex figures like St. Catherine of Siena—a woman who famously cut her hair to avoid marriage and entered a convent. Catherine’s story highlights the challenges of representing saints who queer gender and sexuality, especially given the contradictions in their writings. For example, in Dialogue, Catherine condemns gay sex as “unnatural” and “hateful for God.” Yet, she also urges people to live authentically, famously declaring, “Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
A similar tension appears in the work of Hildegard of Bingen. In her Liber divinorum operum and Scivias, Hildegard describes homosexuality as a “supreme offense against God.” But paradoxically, her music and writings are infused with deeply homoerotic imagery, especially in letters to another religious woman, named Riccardis. Hildegard’s works blur gender lines, notably through her depiction of the female Ecclesia (the Church) united with Mary’s motherhood, using language steeped in intimacy and marital symbolism.
Dani dives into these rich contradictions in their art, portraying six mystics—including Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux—as the illustrator for Shannon Evans’s 2024 book The Mystics Would Like a Word. Through these portraits, Dani captures how these women queer mystics disrupt normative ideas of religious experience, knowledge, gender identity, and sexual expression—challenging us to rethink sanctity beyond conventional boundaries.
A Brief History of Queer Catholic art
Dani’s story echoes the journeys of many queer artists working within the Catholic tradition. Historically, numerous queer Catholic figures—some well-known, like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo—found acceptance and patronage through their art, using religious imagery to express adoration and attraction. Both were accused of homosexuality in their lifetimes, as was Caravaggio, who was notoriously labeled a “sodomite.”
Rumors, whether true or not, even suggest Michelangelo may have had a romantic relationship with Pope Julius II. Today, the late Pope Francis’s own tailor Filippo Sorcinelli is gay and spoke with Vogue about the connection of queerness and Catholicism connected through a language of sensual beauty. Deeply connected to Catholicism, Sorcinelli reflects that his faith today is like “walking through a grand, abandoned cathedral. I recognize its majesty, the echo of ancient prayers, the beauty of its frescoes and naves, but I wander among the columns searching for something--perhaps a sound, a scent, a light.”
The Church he reflects is full of “complex, even contradictory meanings,” including those which exclude gay people just like Sorcinelli who defined the aesthetics of multiple papacies.
Acknowledging this legacy, the LGBTQ+ travel company Quiiky began leading sexuality-centered Vatican tours in 2015, openly discussing da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Michelangelo as gay or bisexual—though, of course, these modern categories didn’t exist for them. Dani emphasizes that many saints and artists were queer in ways that transcend contemporary labels; their work helps reclaim this evidence of queerness, even if the terms we use today don’t fit their historical realities or the complexity of their identities.
Lino DiNallo, who runs Out Adventures Tours in northern Italy, highlights Michelangelo’s “sexual gravitas” at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Though a devout Catholic, Michelangelo’s art was shaped by Neoplatonism, which celebrated the God-given beauty of the physical world. His highly sensual depictions of nude, muscular men were thus regarded as holy.
Sexual intimacy has long served as a visual language of spiritual ecstasy. Hildegard of Bingen’s writings, for example, celebrate female pleasure independent of men, describing viriditas—a “greening power” that animates all living things. This divine force makes women sexually potent and sacred, reflecting a cosmic reason present in all creation.
Saint Teresa of Ávila, too, famously employed sexually charged language to describe encounters with God. Her mystical visions inspired Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s controversial altarpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which depicts an ephebic angel poised to pierce the saint’s heart as she levitates in rapturous light.
Given this rich history, it is almost comical how contemporary Catholics often resist explicitly Catholic art exploring embodiment and queerness. Emma recently wrote for the National Catholic Reporter about Fabián Cháirez’s exhibition La venida del Señor in Mexico, which features nine provocative paintings portraying consecrated individuals in intimate or sexually charged poses. Cháirez draws directly on a longstanding Church tradition of using sexual intimacy and ecstasy as metaphors for spiritual enlightenment.
These examples are just a few among many—from queer and trans saints in medieval hagiographies to late Middle Ages sculptures of the folk saint St. Wilgefortis, a gender-expansive princess who prayed for a beard to escape marriage. Though her cult was suppressed in 1969 due to scant historical evidence, her legacy endures as a symbol for queer and trans Catholic
Queer Religious Art Today
Today, artists like Rio Eden and Elliot Barnhill visualize queer and trans bodies as sacred. Gabriel Garcia Roman’s Queer Icons series and Barnhill’s depictions of seraphim marked with top surgery scars affirm that queer and trans bodies are made in God’s image. Dani’s work continues this tradition by portraying a queer and trans God and saints, building on a history of homoerotic depictions of St. Sebastian and an ephebic Jesus, while also envisioning a Black, Brown, and female God.
Queer authors such as Charlie Claire Burgess also explore how queerness is deeply woven into Catholicism and other spiritual traditions, including Native European religions and Hinduism. Their recent book Queer Devotion expands this conversation.
As Dani shared, their art draws on a long and rich tradition of queer Catholic artists expressing themselves and their loves through visual form. It’s especially ironic considering the rise of modern “Crusader Bros,” who idealize the medieval period for its rigid cis-heteronormativity—when hagiographies and Church art tell a far more complicated story, one where queerness is divinity embodied.
There is power and humor in calling out this hypocrisy through art. Dani finds great potential in being a playful, even silly artist—discovering, amplifying, and making explicitly queer the evidence preserved in the lives of these saints and creators.
For many queer Catholics, the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV sparked reflection and mourning, but also community and humor. During this time, PopeCrave—a fan account for the 2024 film Conclave—emerged, creating memes celebrating the Church’s queer pageantry and poetics and raising thousands for intersex rights through a Conclave zine.
Like PopeCrave, Dani embraces the freedom to joke about the Church’s queerness, grounding their existence and art in two millennia of history. As Dani says, “Even if there were no apologetics in existence about why being queer is not a sin, you still owe me the dignity that I can and do exist.”
Conclusion
Dani’s story and the history of queer artists within the Catholic Church remind us that queerness is not a modern anomaly or a contradiction to faith — it is deeply woven into the fabric of Christian tradition. From saints who challenged gender norms to Renaissance masters who infused their work with coded expressions of love and desire, the Church’s visual and spiritual heritage is richer and more complex than many realize.
By reclaiming this legacy through art, Dani and contemporary queer creators invite us to see God, faith, and ourselves through a more expansive, joyful, and inclusive lens. Their work challenges the gatekeepers of tradition and opens space for new narratives where identity, spirituality, and creativity coexist authentically.
In a world where queer bodies and stories are still marginalized, this celebration of queer Catholic artistry is both a powerful act of resistance and a profound affirmation: that all are made in the image of the divine, worthy of dignity, love, and belonging.
As we reflect on these histories and art, may we carry forward a spirit of openness, curiosity, and radical welcome—honoring those who came before us and making space for those yet to come.
Listen to the podcast episode that inspired this essay on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
 | A guest post by
|